A New Period Opens : The Bourgeoisie Goes on Massive Offensive Against the World Proletariat which Resists

What significance and what implications can be drawn from the bloody terrorist attacks of January 7th and 9th 2015 in Paris and the organisation of massive demonstrations for national unity, the defense of free expression and democracy which followed in all French cities and others cities and capitals worldwide ? No doubt that their magnitude largely exceeds the French national size. The immediate mobilization – the very day! – of the capitalist world’s main leaders (40 altogether!), the French Hollande of course, but also the British Cameron who was the first to say he will participate from this Wednesday January 7th, the German Merkel, the Italian Renzi, the Spanish Rajoy – just to mention the main Europeans –, from African and Asian countries up to the “sworn enemies” of today, the Israeli Netanyahou and the Palestinian Abbas, calling millions of people to demonstrate behind them in the streets of Paris, expresses so clearly the international unity of the main bourgeoisies of the capitalist world on this occasion – the unique sour note being Obama’s absence. The bourgeoisies only unite to confront the proletariat. That is to say that the event is not insignificant; it marks an important moment and step; there will “a pre and a post”. This means that the main impact of these days of killing frenzy, of radiant nationalism and overwhelming media campaigns are primarily directed towards the civilian populations; i.e. mainly to workers, salaried, employed, unemployed, who produce most of the social wealth. And it happens at the very moment that capitalism is in deeper and deeper crisis and democratic states prepare to attack living and working conditions already strongly damaged during the last decades, and more particularly since the open economic crisis in 2008.

For the international proletariat, for the working classes of all countries, in particular from the central countries of the capitalist world, the Paris slaughters and the response of the greater imperialist powers and their states open up a new phase in the permanent struggle between capital and labour, between bourgeoisie and international proletariat.

The Capitalist Crisis Imposes its Imperatives, its Logic and its Bloody and Barbarous Consequences such as War and Terrorism

Since 2008 and the bursting of the so-called “subprime” financial crisis, the economic dead-end of capitalism is striking. Since, it has not stopped confirming itself and worsening. It has the consequence of redoubling the economic attacks against the working class everywhere in the world and a considerable sharpening of imperialist rivalries and, above all, wars. The infernal mechanics of capitalism in crisis inescapably drive it, because the exacerbated economic competition which concentrates at the level of each national capital, to imperialist rivalries and, above all, into a process and a logic towards generalized imperialist war opposing directly the great powers.

« 2013: as the deadline approaches, the historical alternative increasingly materializes for billions of human beings and the social classes involved. As the working class also bears the burden of preparation for generalized war, its resistance against the effects of the economic crisis simultaneously tends to oppose the logic of war. And thus the course of class struggle is in massive confrontation with this. These clashes will be as decisive for the exploited class, and at the same time the revolutionary class, because depending on whether it will come out of it defeated or not, the dynamics of the class struggle of the new relation of forces will turn towards one or the other term of the historical alternative. The working class holds the keys to this historical dilemma » (Theses on the International Situation adopted at the Constitution Conference of the IGCL, Revolution or War #1).

From a “more or less distant” historical perspective, the alternative which presents itself to humanity, Proletarian Revolution or generalized Imperialist War, becomes today more present, more concrete, more “material” – as a more insistent “obligation” – which orients, dictates, imposes more and more directly the actions and decisions of the two main social classes of capitalist society. The utilization of terrorism which has become systematic by the bourgeoisie is one of its manifestations.

Terrorism more than ever at the Service of the Bourgeoisie

We won’t come back here to the history of the Islamic terrorist groups whose origin is always, directly or indirectly, linked to the imperialist rivalries, to the states of the main capitalist world powers – United States in the lead – up to smaller powers but not less imperialist as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, etc. For anyone who looks a minimum into the question, the secret service’s hand, particularly western ones and especially the American CIA, appears in the setting up, the financing and the manipulation (more or less directly) of Al Qaida and IS (on this point in particular, the reader can refer to the ICT comrades’ article The Charlie Hebdo massacre). Directly or indirectly, terrorism is the weapon of the capitalist and imperialist democratic states. It has become a tool, an arm, of the imperialist conflicts in Asia, in the Middle East and Africa which daily strikes and terrorizes even more savagely – if so we can say – the local populations – and much less the armies of the great imperialist powers which are engaged there.

One more time, we reaffirm: “Islamic” or not, terrorism has never been a weapon of the working class and has always been utilized against it by the bourgeoisie. Today, terrorism, especially the Islamist variety, is a means and a moment of the imperialist rivalries and wars and, very often as in the Paris attacks – but also the ones of Ottawa, Sydney and New York these last months, of Belgium and France of these last years –, it is also returned and directed against the working class to terrorize it, to divide it by sowing the poison of racism – particularly anti-Muslim – amongst its most backward fractions and, for its other components, to mystify them, to lead them to regroup behind the “democratic anti-racist” bourgeois state. All the “lone wolves” individuals from North America and “European young islamists” were known, on files, had even been previously jailed, and under surveillance by police and intelligence services. It is really difficult not to see that the special forces had incited, organized, manipulated, or at least “allowed” to one degree or another, these individuals to take their murderous and barbarous logic to its conclusion. Is this not precisely what the Human Rights Watch NGO denounces in one report?

« Many prosecutions have properly targeted individuals engaged in planning or financing terror attacks, the groups found. But many others have targeted people who do not appear to have been involved in terrorist plotting or financing at the time the government began to investigate them. (…) In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act. Multiple studies have found that nearly 50 percent of the federal counter terrorism convictions since September 11, 2001, resulted from informant-based cases. Almost 30 percent were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot. In the case of the “Newburgh Four,” for example, who were accused of planning to blow up synagogues and attack a US military base, a judge said the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” and had, in the process, made a terrorist out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.” The FBI often targeted particularly vulnerable people, including those with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent. The government, often acting through informants, then actively developed the plot, persuading and sometimes pressuring the targets to participate, and provided the resources to carry it out » (July 21st 2014 US: Terrorism Prosecutions Often An Illusion, Investigations, Trials of American Muslims Rife with Abuseby Human Rights Watch, our emphasis).

There is a line of continuity between the terrorist attacks in North America, Australia and Europe. They all have the same characteristics, the very ones the Human Rights Watch describes; the same kind of individual already known by police and the same procedures; and they give rise to the same internal ideological themes driving to the division of the population between Muslims and non-Muslims, nationals and immigrants; and to lead the workers to a false choice between racism and anti-racism which extends the one between ’Islamic’ terrorism and anti-terrorism while racism and terrorism can’t disappear as long as capitalism is not destroyed.

We know – because the proletariat’s revolutionary theory, that is Marxism, taught us – that the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production have the force of law and impose themselves on the bourgeoisie and its politics. After one century of historical decline and incredible development of the economic and imperialist contradictions and state totalitarianism, we know that terrorism has become one the main manifestations of imperialist rivalries and is utilized by all states. How much the second half of the 20th century has already taught us! We also know that the bourgeoisie won’t hesitate a second, when the danger is major for it and its system, to use it in a direct and bloody way against the working class, particularly in a revolutionary period. Let’s remember Rosa Luxemburg’s assassination in 1919 in Germany and with her the thousands and thousands of revolutionary workers!

Terrorism Utilized for Reinforcing the Repression Arsenal against the Working Class

But terrorism, today so-called “Islamist” terrorism, serves also as a pretext for the reinforcement of the repression apparatus of the totalitarian state. Let’s leave aside here the incredible pressure the French government and the state apparatus (which has financed the print run of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo up to 7 million copies!), profusely relayed by the media, have exerted to impose the badge and slogan “Je suis Charlie”. Anyone who refuses to affirm “I am Charlie”, indeed refuses to wear the badge, whatever is the reason, is accused at once, made to feel guilty, even punished at school or college for the youths, in the workplaces for the salaried for national indignity and collusion with terrorism! Stupid teenagers are condemned for many months to jail for having uttered imbecilities and racist or terrorist insults. Others, not much older, still bigger idiots, at the same level of the “Right” racists, are fired for misconduct.

The important point is not there. As the American September 11th had been the occasion for setting up the Patriot Act (legitimizing amongst other things the Guantanamo imprisonments), the “French September 11th” sees bourgeois politicians calling for the same measures, for the adoption of a French Patriot Act, while others outbid: one of Sarkozy’s former Ministers calls for sending the army to the... “Muslim” suburbs. The European legislation is going to be changed once more so that the European police can survey even more the Internet and the “private” exchanges (mails, Skype, social networks, etc.). As the TV consultants, former policemen or secret agents acknowledge it themselves, this won’t prevent other terrorist attacks. On the other hand, we know it, this will reinforce the surveillance and the control of all the sectors of society and particularly the working class and the anti-capitalist political “opponents”.

Besides the discourses calling for national unity before the minute of silence on the workplaces after the Charlie murders, the surveillance and the repression in the companies, in the workplaces is going to be strengthened:

« The magazine Der Spiegel has reported that the Daimler corporation has been comparing the names, addresses and birth dates of all its 280,000 employees worldwide with data on European Union (EU) and United States terrorist lists in order to contribute to “the fight against terrorism”. Daimler’s works council [i.e. the unions] explicitly supports this arrangement (…) Employees who show up on one of the terrorist lists are to be “released”, that is, fired (…). These lists are created by the secret service agencies. They decide who is a “terror suspect”, despite the fact that so many “suspects” can end up on such lists simply because of a similarity of names » (Germany: Daimler screening workers for terrorist links, www.wsws.org, D. Henning, January 13th 2015).

Thus, it is a whole repressive apparatus which is set up whose main target is not so much the struggle against terrorism but to prepare the state apparatus to repress the working class and its revolutionary political minorities.

The Racist and Democratic Anti-Racist Demonstrations against the Working Class Unity

The slaughters at Charlie Hebdo and at the Jewish market in Paris which extend the series of terrorist murders and attacks in Canada, United States, Australia these last months, come to fuel even more, to reinforce and provoke racist, anti-Muslim, feelings in the populations (including amongst the more backward strata of the proletariat) and, in return, anti-racist street counter-demonstrations on a democratic and state terrain. This dynamic is particularly evident in Germany where, for some months now, there have been weekly demonstrations in Dresden called by the organization PEGIDA to which have responded street counter-demonstrations called by... Merkel herself. It is in all Europe, at different levels according to the national situations, that the bourgeoisie uses and exacerbates both the racist, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant feelings and pushes on the other side so that the populations, the “citizens”, take to the streets in the name of anti-racism and democracy. Numerous racist and anti-immigrant demonstrations have occurred these last months in Italy and Greece. PEGIDA itself spreads to other countries: « besides Spain, Pegida has rising or announced ramifications in Austria, in Sweden and Switzerland » (Libération, French newspaper, January 14th 2015, translated by us). And no doubt that the anti-racist counter-demonstrations on the bourgeois terrain will go hand in hand with this “international extension” of PEGIDA.

The same phenomenon has arisen in the United States even though it was under a slightly different pretext which doesn’t change the nature of the ideological and political offensive: the murder of a young black man in the small town of Ferguson in Missouri, the repeated murders of young black men, even including children, and the absence of legal charges against the policemen who had killed them, couldn’t but have a deliberately provocative character and push to demonstrations. Without going back to details in the course of the events, demonstrations, riots and lootings, increased repression, and media’s orchestration, it is clear that the American state has played with the two moments, murders and judicial decision on one part, and street demonstrations on the other, to create a tense climate opposing blacks and whites – « Two days later [October 6th], protesters at the Cardinals-Dodgers Major League Baseball playoff game were greeted by boos and demands that they “get a job” or “go back to Africa.” » according to The New Yorker, October 15th 2014 – and aiming at mobilizing for a democratic police around the state. At the time of writing, a week after the Paris assassinations, Fox News TV watched by millions of Americans is violently boosting these racist campaigns. They present cities such as Birmingham in Great Britain as exclusively Muslim, and the Arab neighborhoods in Paris as “no-go zones” where police and “Europeans” – understand “whites” – can’t go and where all women are veiled while men wear tee-shirts with Bin Laden’s image. Besides maintaining anti-European feelings (and even more anti-American ones in Europe for their ridiculousness and the delirious extravagance as well as their mediatization) to nationalist and imperialist ends, these televised campaign fully participate in the spreading of racism and anti-Arab racist feelings.

A very well known journalist, Laurence Haim, permanent reporter in United States for one of the main French TV channels and despite a great professional experience, has not understood why she was urged to go to Ferguson and why later she has been criticized for not having gone. What she says is highly revealing both of the reality of the events in Ferguson and of their staging by the bourgeois media, but also of the latter’s manipulative nature:

« It is a media hysteria I have rarely known. I refuse to go. And Monday night, as announced, it bursts. CNN makes a breaking on their reporter who took a stone in her head. The breaking lasts 2 hours looped: “our reporter has received a stone in the head”. Then, I call reliable American producers to ask them:

- “is this really war in Ferguson?” and they answer me: “Listen, it is really complicated, there are 500 cameras, 3 buildings burning, but as they are built in paper-maché, that makes big flames and we all are on live broadcast”.

I ask them, “but how many people are in the street, how many that demonstrate against racism?”

- “Well, it is a little complicated because there is the family who was in front of the court saying they’re going to break everything" » (L’important, translated by us from French)

We thus witness an international offensive, following the terrorist attacks, against the working class aiming at the same time to divide it, trap it in false alternatives and to lead it to support the state and capitalist democracy.

An Offensive of the Bourgeoisie against the Proletariat’s Resistance to the Logic of its System

The orchestration of the October American demonstrations against racist police repression has been set up following the massive and numerous street protests in Mexico against the assassinations and the disappearances of tens of young students in September-October in Ayotzinapa in the Guerrero state. The American protests have been presented as the continuity of the Mexican movement. It is not the case. The former have been provoked and developed on another class terrain than the demonstrations in Mexico. They represent a bourgeois class response and opposition by focusing on the racial and anti-racist terrain, on the division black-white and on the democratization of American police; i.e. in the framework of and support of the state. The huge and numerous demonstrations in Mexico come within the scope of another dynamic and on another terrain: the more they developed and spread to the country, the more they denounced the state as a whole: its government, its regional state governors and local caciques, the party in power (PRI) but also the other parties such as the Left one (PRD), the police, the Army and Justice. This means that the dynamic of the movement initiated by emotion, anger and indignation, tended to set itself against the bourgeois state and to take on an eminently proletarian class nature. Nothing such in the small (as the French journalist revealed) demonstrations in Ferguson which quickly turned into riot and simple looting and still less in the demonstrations which took place in the other American cities which, up to our knowledge, were all set within the ground of bourgeois democracy.

The movement in Mexico is situated within the dynamic of the working class struggles of the last months (see our Briefs) and years. It is a general push, despite the media’s attempts to censor and silence it, which has given the energy to these “Mexican” reactions so that they are on a clear anti-capitalist terrain.

Since 2008, there have been a vast number of worker’s mobilizations and demonstrations against the effects of the crisis on all continents. The fact most of them have been silenced by the TV and newspapers and have been controlled and managed by the states, particularly by the unions, doesn’t change the fact that this slow dynamic of militancy and resistance to capitalist logic confirms itself and continues to develop. On the contrary, the censorship of the struggles and the preventive setting up of great union national “Days of Action” and street demonstrations – especially in western Europe – shows well that the worker’s resistance, as insufficient it may be, is a reality and an obstacle for the bourgeoisie. Actually, not only is it constrained to increase labor exploitation because of the crisis but also because of the necessity of military and armament expenditures that the growing imperialist rivalries require. But above all, the perspective of generalized imperialist war contained in the present situation of capitalism calls for more and more important and increased economic sacrifices and an “active” support of the great masses of the international proletariat to the main bourgeois ideological mystifications. This support aims that the revolutionary class accepts, besides the sacrifices – including physical ones –, to regroup behind the national state and the bourgeoisie – often in the name of the “defense of democracy against barbarism” as it had been the case in 1914 and 1939. The persistence of working class struggles for the defense of its class interests on all continents and almost all countries – whatever their force – represents a hindrance to the march towards generalized war in which capitalism must engage. The historical experience, in particular from the 1930s, shows us that, to go into a generalized war, capital must confront the proletariat and inflict on it an “historical” defeat; that is not only at the economic, ideological and political levels but also a minimum of bloody physical defeats as in Germany, Russia and Spain in the years of the 1920s and 1930; and so to extinguish any dynamic of significant workers’ resistance (even though it never fully disappears, including in the darkest period as, for instance, during the 2nd World War). This is why we talked up to now of an “historical course” or dynamic, towards massive confrontations between the main antagonistic classes of capitalism.

The Paris terrorist attacks and the events that followed, i.e. the reaction of the states, the organization of the Parisian demonstration but also the development of racist and anti-racist demonstrations show that these massive confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat are beginning. They show that the bourgeoisie, European at the head, has taken the initiative of engaging this showdown against the international proletariat, to provoke these massive confrontations. It is now constrained to do so by the urgency that the worsening of the economic crisis imposes and by the exacerbation of the imperialist rivalries which ensue from it. The fact that the main bourgeoisies, the main imperialist powers, display themselves united – up to the Paris boulevards! – on this occasion clearly indicates the anti-proletarian dimension of these Parisian days: the rival imperialisms silence and leave in second place their antagonisms only to confront the working class. It is one of the lessons that the Paris Commune delivered and which has been much confirmed during the proletarian revolutionary wave from 1917 to 1923 in Russia as well as in Germany.

The Historical Weakness of the Bourgeoisie in Front of the Massive Class Confrontations

Does this mean the working class defeat is inescapable at the end of the period which is opening up and that the bourgeoisie is going to succeed to force the working class to completely submit and to lead it behind the states, to make it abandon its class ground and to inflict on it a bloody defeat? No, far from it. Contrary to what many can believe at first sight, by staying either on the surface of things or remaining prisoners of a mechanical, indeed static, vision, the bourgeoisie doesn’t enter in this phase in a favorable situation at the historical level; objectively if one prefers. And the immediate success in the utilization of the Paris murders and the January 11th march doesn’t put into question this assessment. At first, we just are at the very beginning of this phase and January 2015 doesn’t constitute but the first episode, the first initiative, of these confrontations. Already, and despite the national and international unity displayed, signs of contradictions within the ruling class have arisen: the inability of the French bourgeoisie to integrate the extreme-right Front National (30% of the votes according to the present polls) in the demonstration in Paris; Obama’s absence at this same demo. Far from interrupting or losing intensity, January sees immediately reappear opposed interests within the ruling class; thus we see a revival and an accentuation of wars and military interventions opposing the great powers: Ukraine, Mali, Libya, Iraq, Syria, etc. On the other side of the class barricade, the weeks and months to come are going to confirm that the working class continues to struggle against the different economic attacks which are already announced; and so that it turns its back on “national unity”. In this sense, if the Paris demonstration has been an immediate success by managing to make millions of people march behind 40 state leaders (unheard of since 1945), and if the number of proletarians may have participated as individuals, there was no participation as working class but as “French citizen” despite the so-called “worker’s” unions call to participate. If the ruling class displays that it is going to contest the working class demonstrations against the crisis and against capitalism with its own mobilizations on a bourgeois terrain, it does not yet have the means to make the working class as such demonstrate behind it, with a mystified and derailed feeling of class belonging, as it could have done it in the 1930s – in great part thanks to the mass Stalinist parties.

More generally, beyond the defense of democracy and nation adapted under diverse variants according to the moments and places, the bourgeois ideologues and propagandists are going to be less and less capable to effectively argue that the immediate sacrifices are necessary for future prosperity and peace... at the moment the crisis lasts for 40 years without a break and it dramatically speeds up today; at this moment wars are multiplying and spreading on all continents. It is the yearning for peace after the slaughter in the trenches and the immediate “possibilities” of implementing it on which the ruling classes played with success to derail important parts of the proletariat from revolutionary action from 1919 onwards in Germany and western Europe. It is the – relative - reduction of unemployment and thus the prospect of economic revival, of capitalist prosperity, which also enabled the bourgeoisie – with the New Deal and the Popular Front in the USA and France, the full employment under Nazism in Germany, all preparing the generalized imperialist war by the increasing militarist production - to calm the class reactions (massive strikes of May-June 1936 in Belgium and France, massive demonstrations and riots of unemployed in the United States) and to reduce them by maintaining and even increasing their control by the Socialist parties and above all by the Stalinist CP. This means that, in the period which begins, the capitalist ruling class won’t be able to play on the perspective of peace nor on prosperity to mask capitalism’s historical bankruptcy.

Today, capitalist crisis and imperialist war are presenting at the same time and openly appear to nourish one another. This weakens the influence of capitalist ideology and limits its immediate capacity to durably drag the whole proletariat behind the capitalist state and the ruling class. The fact that the ruling class deliberately takes the initiative of massive confrontations against the proletariat is not, ultimately, the expression of its strength but of its historical weakness or, if one prefers, of its historical difficulties and contradictions.

The International Proletariat Must Go Further against Capitalism

In this historical confrontation, and contrary to the appearance of a static or photographic vision which the slowness and the limitations of the working class struggles to date could also feed, the historical situation which sees crisis and war presenting at the same time historically, objectively, plays in favor of the proletariat. Actually, to date, even though its immediate struggles don’t question capitalism and its misery and logic of death, the working class when it mobilizes, stays on anti-capitalist class terrain against the bourgeois state. This is fundamental. It is precisely what hinders the march of the bourgeoisie towards war and what it has now to eliminate urgently. Of course, it is the case in western Europe as historical center of capitalism. But it is also the case in countries where the working class tradition and experience is lesser.

This dynamic towards class confrontation is what the proletarian demonstrations in Brazil during the soccer World Cup and the ones in Mexico against the massacres committed by the party in power and the state, to give two examples, express. Let us make no mistake, the direct or indirect orchestration of the racist and anti-racist street demonstrations in Germany and Europe, the demonstrations around the racist murders of Ferguson in the United States, and of course the manifestations which had been held from the night of January 7th to the 11th, attempt precisely to respond in an offensive and aggressive manner on a bourgeois class terrain to these particular expressions of working class resistance.

Obviously, when we affirm that the historical situation is in favor of the proletariat, this doesn’t mean that the path to revolution is open and inescapable. This means that it can “win” the massive confrontations which begin and which the international bourgeoisie took the initiative to start. To “win” this phase means that the revolutionary class will succeed to block the bourgeoisie and its projects of misery and generalized war. Thus it will set up the conditions for the opening of a revolutionary period. But for this, still it has to overcome the weaknesses it continues to express. Though, when the proletariat is struggling, it maintains itself on its class ground, it is also true that to date it hasn’t succeeded in forcing a withdrawal of the economic attacks that it suffers (nor the setting up of anti-working class measures for repression in the streets as well as in the workplaces). This weakness doesn’t reside in a lack of willingness to struggle and resist but essentially in its incapacity to raise its fight to the political level; that is to say to assume the political confrontation for the direction of its struggles against the forces, mainly union and Left political forces, which hinder and sabotage them; today, more concretely, for the organisation of the extension of its mobilizations and their unity against the forces which oppose it. In this sense, and to give an example, the break-up of the wildcat strikes in Belgium, October 2014, and the violent clashes with the police by the Antwerpen dockers, the Wallonia metal workers, and other workers, at the working class demonstration in Brussels of November 6th, show the path to follow. Only partly, because these “spontaneous” expressions have not yet been followed – according to our knowledge – by a conscious and determined effort to take charge of this fight whether by initiatives of organisation and regroupment, or extension and development of the strike that the union Days of Action planned in advance – several for November to December 15th – aimed to stifle and prevent, which they have succeeded in doing so far.

Thus, it is at the political, that is “conscious”, level where lies the main weakness of the proletariat today. It affects the great masses of the working class but also, and more particularly, its most militant and conscious sectors and minorities. Last example of this weakness: the railway workers, the dockers, metal workers, the most determined of the wildcat strikes and demonstrations in Belgium didn’t succeed – once more according to our information – to launch slogans of extensions and unity, for instance in the Brussels demonstrations, and to regroup through committees or assemblies for that goal or to keep contacts between them and to prepare the strikes of tomorrow.

Nevertheless, other examples of working class struggles show that the proletariat makes significant steps forwards these last months at the level of its consciousness: the struggles which clearly fought against the state and its repression apparatus in Mexico as well as the earlier ones which strongly opposed the Left government in Brazil.

But this political or “consciousness” weakness expresses itself even more at the level of the revolutionaries and communist minorities. There too, in this particular and essential dimension of the class struggle, there is a stake and a parallel battle, if so we can say, to the one the bourgeoisie has decided today to deliver to the exploited and revolutionary class as a whole.

The New Period is Going to Accelerate the Recomposition of the Revolutionary Camp

A photographic or static vision can only offer an image of dispersion and political hesitation of the revolutionary minorities which make them mostly inaudible and ineffective. The observation is correct in itself for the revolutionary milieu as for the Proletarian Camp, i.e. at least for the political groups and organizations which claim the international Communist Left. Nevertheless, a dynamic vision enables us to place this weakness at its real level: the general offensive of the bourgeoisie can’t but precipitate a recomposition of the revolutionary and communist minorities which has already begun under the blows of the crisis and imperialist rivalries.

It is not by chance that the international revolutionary milieu sees circles and groups surging, some breaking with leftism, other without experience, in different countries and in all continents – we can’t draw up the list here – and that the “old” Proletarian Camp linked to the Communist Left is already openly in a process of recomposition. The acceleration of the obvious decomposition of the ICC which is in a state of permanent internal crisis since 2001 – as it itself acknowledges and writes – is its most striking and negative manifestation. One can add to this the disappearance or the dispersion of groups from the councilist tendency such as Internationalist Perspectives enacting thereby their definitive powerlessness faced with the battle between the classes which is opening. But the bearing and the assertiveness of the ICT on its class positions despite its manifest hesitations to assume with determination and dynamism its central place within this camp, the slow but real reaffirmation of “Bordigist” groups and, we have this pretentiousness, the constitution of our group constitute signs, certainly amongst others, of the strength of the proletariat. New lines of regroupment, of debates and of fracture have already begun to form within the revolutionary milieu and even within the Proletarian Camp; and they can’t but develop even more violently that the class struggle now takes a sharper and more bitter dimension. Already, the impact of the attacks in Paris and their historical significance provoke reflection and debate which interpellate directly the revolutionary and political groups and organizations on their own statement and on their understanding of the event. No doubt that the period which is opening and the outburst of the bourgeois offensive, including its new intensity and the dramatization of the events of the class struggle, will accelerate this recomposition and redefinition of the revolutionary milieu and Proletarian Camp.

The stake of this specific battle? To ensure that this phase of massive confrontations between the classes opens, on the basis of the proletariat’s fightback, at least the material conditions, that is theoretical, political and organizational, for the constitution of the indispensable communist party of tomorrow as the highest expression of class consciousness and thus as organ of political leadership of the proletariat.

The new period which is opening won’t simply give rise to increased capitalist attacks against the working class which will just respond, mechanically, to the higher demanding imperatives of capitalist crisis and imperialist war. The Paris attacks and the ideological and political utilization that has been made of them, means the ruling class is going to lead a much more aggressive and head-on politics against the proletariat through feeding and provoking growing extreme tensions, such as terrorist attacks, violent racist demonstrations, the exacerbation of racist, nationalist, “security” confrontations through the maximum dramatization of all these expressions of division and opposition which are not of a class nature. For the international proletariat, the danger and the trap is to get impressed and terrorized by all the barbarous and bloody acts that the bourgeoisie is going to utilize, to give up its resistance and opposition to capitalism and to its state and regroup behind it under such or such nationalist and democratic banner or slogan.

There are therefore, in the aftermath of the bloody events of Paris, faced with a declaration of war by the international bourgeoisie, the stakes for the international proletariat as a whole, for the most militant fractions of workers, and for the revolutionary and communist minorities in particular.

No to terrorism, no to the anti-terrorist front! No to anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant racism, no to the anti-racist front! No to national unity! No to the defense of the democratic, or not, capitalist state! No to the defense of imperialism of every country!

Already the workers must regroup around the following general slogans:

Let’s resist the capitalist crisis and calls for sacrifices: Yes to working class struggle against Capitalism and its attacks! Let’s defend our working class demands, wages, work, working conditions!

Our interests as salaried or unemployed, as exploited, are the same everywhere regardless of our origins and skin color: Immigrants and non-immigrants, Muslims and non-Muslims, blacks and whites, we all are exploited!

Let’s spread and unify our struggles to all categories, to all sectors and beyond all frontiers! Let’s regroup and fight back against every attack of capital!

Capitalism in crisis wants to drive us to misery and death in a generalized imperialist war: let’s destroy capitalism! That quickly comes genuine Communism (which is the opposite of stalinism), a society without exploitation, without classes, without misery and war!